The everyday politics of “cultural citizenship” among North African immigrant school children in Spain

•Discusses cultural citizenship in social life, by examining how cultural citizenship is the product of everyday practice.•Analysis shows how national-scale identities are linked to (micro) social practices in everyday interactions.•Analysis demonstrates the mundane and quotidian basis of dominant identity ascription.•Argues that classroom interaction can undermine multicultural goal due to teachers’ unexamined belief in homogeneous cultures. In this paper, I examine cultural citizenship not as a stable fact but as the product of everyday practice. The analysis focuses on educational discourses and classroom interactions in the school of a rural town in Spain and in relation to Moroccan immigrant children’s membership and identity. I show how teachers engage in distinction, authentication, and authorization practices, playing on essentialist notions of children’s ethnolinguistic identities and upholding notions of belonging to the nation that are predicated on homogeneity. This paper also examines how Moroccan immigrant children contest teachers’ essentialist formulations by asserting multiple, hybrid forms of membership and belonging.